Jobhop Jobhop's blog : Ignore Social Recruiting At Your Own Peril

Is your competitor effortlessly filling positions, whilst you’re constantly on the hunt for good candidates? You must wonder how they do it, especially as you’ve been told they’re always chatting on Twitter, where do they find the time?

Think about it, being social on the social media platforms is probably how they “effortlessly” fill positions. People get hear about things through word of mouth and that’s exactly the same on social networking platforms, people chat and recommend, that also goes for consumers and candidates.

By 2025 more than 75% of the working population will be of the social media world, born into it, they are digital natives and will know no different. Employers and recruiters cannot ignore social recruiting anymore, candidates will expect to have social relationships with future employers.

Social recruiting is the way forward.

Make the decision to get on board, get a social recruiting strategy in place and then plan the timeline and tactics.

Make a commitment to being social

Not just to yourself, you need to make a commitment to all your employees, a commitment that their company will be a social company. Don’t think that all you need to do is get someone in who “does a bit of social media” and let them run the “social media department” There can’t be just a social media department, it has to be a social business, that means everyone is responsible for reaching out, sharing, collaborating, and customer service, everybody is an ambassador.

Work out what it is you want to achieve

What is it you want to achieve? Are you short on programmers, or perhaps engineers? Perhaps you’re expanding in twelve months and you know you’re going to need another twenty employees, maybe it’s that you need to bring younger people into the company or you’re going to need a chief technology officer (CTO). It may be that you’ve had negative feedback about your recruitment process and you want to achieve a 95% satisfaction rate or perhaps you want to cut recruitment costs by X amount per year, whatever it is you must know what it is you want to achieve.

Who are your targets ?

Work out who your targets are, every skill they’ve got, what type of attitude they have, their likes, their dislikes and their hobbies.

Once you know who your target people are good profiling will lead you to them.

For example if you’re looking for an app developer, the profile you have of them may lead you to free running groups, skate board clubs, reddit, snapchat, github, a regular tech blog, profiling may tell you that they wont be using Linkedin or on any business forums.

What are your tactics ?

Depending on your targets will depend on the tactics you use. There must never be a scatter gun, spray and pray approach, this will completely waste your time and energy.

If decide to use Twitter, ask yourself how will you use Twitter? What Twitter chats will you be including, will you have your own Twitter chat? How many tweets per day? How many visuals per day? What are you listening out for? Who are your targets currently following? How will you know it’s working? What are you monitoring and measuring? These are just a few questions you need to ask when you start putting your tactics together, not just on Twitter, on all the platforms. Remember the tactics are not just the social networking platforms, your social recruiting tactics could be video, podcasts, webinars, on-line presentations, Skype, Live streaming, Hangouts, the list goes on.

Get chatting

Now you know who your targets are you need to be “social” and that means chatting, listening, sharing and signposting, this is called engaging. Do not keep broadcasting the same message at them, that is called spamming. Social recruiting is about building strong relationships with passive candidates, getting to know each other, trusting each other, so when the time comes to fill a position that passive candidate naturally wants to work at your company. They would’ve found everything they need to know about the company, they would’ve been chatting to other employees in the community and they are sure it’s a good culture fit for them.

Get some tools in your tool box

To do social recruiting well you’re going to need some tools in your social recruiting tool box. Social recruiting tools will help to make it easier for you and help manage your time.

Hootsuite

There are other dashboards similar to Hootsuite but I was converted to Hootsuite after using Tweetdeck, Hootsuite is now the preference of Jobhop.

Use the dashboard to monitor conversations, schedule, post to numerous platforms, read reports, assign to team members and much more.

Followerwonk

Use this fab tool to target candidates with particular keywords in the profiles.

Feedly and Buffer

Feedly and buffer work brilliant together. Get great industry content form Feedly and then use buffer to store it and share out across social media at optimum times.

Manage Flitter

Have a tidy up of your Twitter account with this nifty tool.

So off you go to try your hand at social recruiting, remember this though ..it’s social first, recruiting second. If you forget the social you will suck at social recruiting!

JOIN Jobhop and spread the word.

Julie Bishop Jobhop.co.uk

Pic credit MKHmarketing

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